Abstract

At a conference I attended recently, a presenter proposed the perspective of a
school of thought that recommends that, prior to publishing endeavours, authors
must raise questions with themselves. Some of these questions should include:
whether the proposed article would really be knowledge or merely knowledge?;
whether scholarship is the cornerstone of the article?; whether the article is a means
to an end or an end in itself? In this article, I will use some of the findings of a
research study conducted with academic women at selected South African
historically black universities (HBUs), to argue that such questions may increase
self-doubt and may subsequently impinge on publication endeavours. This
becomes particularly poignant for academic women who have a negative
relationship with publishing. The findings of the study elucidate some of the
barriers that academic women at these institutions experienced with regard to
publishing. I feel that such questions at the initiation of publication endeavours may
retard the inception of publishing and render this academic activity more daunting
to academic women, who do not qualify to be promoted because of deficient
publication records, and are over-represented in the lower echelons of academia.